


Casting Off

by Theoroark



Series: FemslashFest 2017 [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Jewish Angela "Mercy" Ziegler, Jewish Jack Morrison, Post-Recall, Rosh HaShana | Jewish New Year, Self-Reflection, Tashlikh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 08:56:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13004268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Theoroark/pseuds/Theoroark
Summary: Day One:Letting GoThe synagogue had a bus that was headed to the Nile after Rosh Hashanah services, but Angela had an urgent appointment she had to go to. So that evening, she and Fareeha walked down together, her pockets full of scraps of paper. Fareeha pulled the prayer up on her holovid and Angela leaned her head against her shoulder and they recited it together. Then Angela crouched down at the river’s bank and dropped her first piece of paper in.





	Casting Off

The synagogue had a bus that was headed to the Nile after Rosh Hashanah services, but Angela had an urgent appointment she had to go to. So that evening, she and Fareeha walked down together, her pockets full of scraps of paper. Fareeha pulled the prayer up on her holovid and Angela leaned her head against her shoulder and they recited it together. Then Angela crouched down at the river’s bank and dropped her first piece of paper in.

 

For how angry she was at Ana, she thought as the little square dipped down and into the night. Her fingers were on the next slip but she tried to slow, tried to remember that penitence without reflection and reform was selfish.

 

Even before her disappearance, Angela had noticed how Ana would linger in the medbay whenever one of her soldiers was down, how she admitted to difficulty sleeping and increased alcohol consumption on her physicals. Even someone who was not a doctor could have connected the dots. But back then, Angela had so much more pressing cases than some PTSD, and besides, Ana was strong, wasn’t she?

 

She had known better, but she had secured Ana so firmly on her pedestal that when the temple started to crumble Angela had not noticed her fall. And yet, even though she had known better, even though she had failed Ana just as much as Ana had failed her, she could not help the anger and betrayal she felt when Ana had crawled out of the rubble and stood again, cracked and faded. She should have had more empathy, would have more empathy, for Fareeha’s sake if for no other reason.

 

Fareeha watched the scraps flutter into the water for a while, but started tapping on her holovid before Angela had finished her first pocket of paper. She did not blame her. She had always taken a long time at Tashlikh, even as a child. She remembered her parents standing behind her, amused and exasperated, as she tossed in, “took two Kit Kats from Ms. Meier’s candy dish instead of one,” “said I made my bed but really just straightened out the comforter,” “got a B in P.E.”…

 

She remembered her first Rosh Hashanah at Overwatch. There had been a temple near the Swiss base where the Jewish staff went, and afterwards they had all walked down to the creek together. Angela had ended up next to Commander Morrison and she had been new and shy and embarrassingly intimidated by him, but he had pulled two paper boats out of his pocket and she had stared, puzzled. He caught her and smiled crookedly.

 

“P.R. thinks people will read into how many I send down,” he said. “But they were kind enough to let me put my sins into two categories. Professional–” he hefted one boat with one hand, then held out the second in the other, “–and personal.”

 

Some of the people around them were smiling and laughing– it was clearly not the boats’ first appearance– and Angela did as well, politely. But as she watched Commander Morrison send his two boats down the stream, and slowly generated her own blizzard of pulp, she could not help but judge him. She was young and new, but she was not naive. She knew any position as martial and political as Morrison’s meant terrible decisions and terrible things. The least he could do was remember those he had condemned.

 

She was not sure when she had started to understand him, or started to view Ana’s descent as flat pitch. But she knew about three years before the fall, she had stood at the creek’s edge and tossed the paper in mechanically and when she was out of it, she still had so many sins she had not sent floating away. The humanitarian crises that she had read about at her desk before exiting the tab and going back to work. The Omnics on the battlefields who had asked for her help when she could not help them, did not know how, and chose to continue not to know how. All the times she had taken it upon herself to decide who could be saved and who could not. And she realized, as she tallied up those categories, that she could no longer remember each individual transgression. Her getting into a fight with her girlfriend stood out in her mind more than thousands displaced in Poland.

 

The last Rosh Hashanah of Overwatch, a few weeks before the explosion at the base, she and Commander Morrison had walked from temple to the creek alone. All the others were gone, dead or quit or under investigation. Ana was gone. Angela had held the basket of paper and Commander Morrison had grabbed a fistful and thumbed them into the water slowly and watched them float away. She tried to do the same but her mind kept wandering to her upcoming testimony and how ashen Commander Reyes had been looking recently and how she should use her time off. She put a dozen in and stood up and left, leaving him to turn the river white by himself.

 

Despite her efforts, the Nile was almost black now, save for the patches hit by street lights and the moon. Angela held the last scrap of paper between her fingers.

 

She had thought about it all day, about whether or not the recall was a sin. She had answered because she had always regretted not speaking up before, maybe she could have stopped something, saved someone. If Overwatch was to come back, she wanted it to come back under her watch. More realistically, she had answered because Fareeha had answered. But she could not forget the shadow of Ana’s letter on Fareeha’s desk or the wake of Commander Morrison’s boats. She liked the Angela who walked her dog to the farmer’s market and flew out to refugee camps and ordered pizza after she and her wife got back from the gym. She did not like the Angela who had stood in Zurich with a handful of paper and a staticky mind.

 

Fareeha must have noticed her hesitation, because she put down her holovid and picked up Angela’s hand.

 

“Do you want to talk about it?”

 

Fareeha squeezed her hand and Angela closed her eyes. She was not going back to Overwatch the same person and she was not going back to Overwatch alone.

 

“It’s okay,” she said. She threw the paper in the river and stood, pulling Fareeha up with her. “Let’s go home.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Another year another no canon Jewish characters another time I'm going to have to meet Chu in the pit.
> 
> I'm @tacticalgrandma on tumblr if you want to talk there.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and any comments/kudos would mean the world to me!


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